Tearin' up My Heart
by xXSlasherXx
Summary: Royce Clayton possesses no beating heart, yet he yearns for the man who provides warmth to his torn soul. Ultimately, there is no love that could be more emotionally endeavoring than the dead loving the living. Contains M/M relationship.


**Tearin' up My Heart**

 _Earth Angel,_ the 1954 debut single of the singing group known as the Penguins, faintly echoed through the transparent maze composed of cells with containment spells intricately inscribed upon their ectobar walls. The song's soothing presence originated from the inside of Royce Clayton's containment cube, playing from the radio of the overturned phantasmic car on which he sat, bat in hand as usual. This was the song that always played while he waited intently to be in the presence of the one he desired.

His blue, cadaverous eyes flickered down the corridor at the sound of footsteps, and a man's voice speaking with great authority(most likely into his cell phone). Sure enough, the slick-haired, gray-eyed lawyer, Ben Moss, strolled down the corridor, heedless to the condemning glares and hisses that the other imprisoned ghosts collectively sent in his direction. The teenage wraith climbed off his totaled vehicle, an odd half-smile forming on his equally totaled face as the haughty lawyer came to a halt before his cell.

"I don't give a _shit_ how colossal his net worth is!" Ben barked into his phone, his other hand clutching the handle of what had to have been the most expensive-looking briefcase that the perpetually seventeen spirit had ever seen. "Tell Cyrus to either double what he's offered or find someone _else_ to play ferryman!"

He snapped the device shut, glaring through the lens of his spectral viewers. The Torn Prince smirked at lawyer's comical fury before lightly tapping his bat against his cell's glass, causing Ben to turn and face him.

"What are _you_ looking at?" he intrepidly demanded with a playful sneer, which Royce returned. He tucked his cell phone into the pocket of his suit's trousers and set down the briefcase.

"We only have ten minutes, alright?" he said, his voice now low and gentle.

Royce nodded in understanding and stepped back as the wall of his prison slid open. The sweet and resonating lyrics of _Earth Angel_ floated out of his cell. Ben shook his head.

"Kid, we have _got_ to introduce you to some songs from this decade," he quipped before invitingly opening his arms for him. The dead boy neither attacked the lawyer or attempted to flee the basement; he walked out of his cell and into Ben's warm, lively embrace, encasing his arms around his waist and laying the tattered district of his face against his chest.

With adoring eyes, Ben pulled the ghost's cool being securely to him, the song swirling around the mortally mismatched lovers. He gingerly ran his fingers through Royce's hair. Royce, still clinging to the lawyer, pulled away slightly to give Ben a good view of the heavyhearted look in the eye that had been untouched by his screeching death.

"This is all going to be over soon, Royce," he assured. Ghosts were not incapable of speaking, but rarely did so due to their minds being distorted from the endless recollecting of their untimely ends. Ben had learned to read Royce's emotions and detect when something was on his mind—what remained of it.

Dana Newman, the Angry Princess, rolled her immensely dilated pupils as she sullenly scrutinized the embracing men, living protectively cradling the dead. Royce spotted this and sent the scar-riddled woman a disdainful glare over Ben's shoulder. She smirked before retreating to the back of her bloodstained cell. She was perhaps the only ghost—other than the Withered Lover—that hadn't reprimanded the former athlete for his unhinging affection for the sharp-tongued breather. While not particularly disgusted by the concept of two men being together, Dana couldn't help but regard the "relationship" as an otherworldly display of Stockholm syndrome. As deceptively sweet as this scene was, Dana's experience with Royce's little crush had resulted in him becoming the object of her ire.

That smug "nice tits" comment he had made upon her capture remained engraved in the irascible beauty's memory.

Royce himself had initially felt malice towards Ben when he had considered him as nothing more than another one their captors. A mutual love of baseball had drawn Ben Moss to the fifth ghost.

Perhaps the corniest, silliest, earthiest, most sickeningly cliché initiation of a bond between a ghost and a living being, from Dana's long-headed perspective. But she was courteous enough—in a ghost's standards—to not voice her input to the boy. After all, they had established something that, at most, _nodded_ in the direction of a budding friendship. Royce had confided to Dana and Jean Kriticos(The Withered Lover) that he, while alive, had kept his sexual preference convincingly concealed due to the 50s having been the decade when prejudice was at its most regnant. He had not even had so much as a _secret_ relationship out of fear that his various crushes would be straight—and greatly disgusted. Leading to him being outed and cruelly ostracized.

By his peers.

His family.

Ultimately, society as a whole.

After more than forty years of haunting the lifeless baseball field that had been the scenery of his marveled glory, his loneliness had gradually drained him of the confidence and hot-bloodedness that had driven him to near greatness. To have finally been able to feel a love so genuine, even under such lurid circumstances...

" _I fell for you, and I knew,_

 _the vision of your love-loveliness._

 _I hope and I pray that someday,_

 _I'll be the vision of your hap-happiness._

 _Oh-oh-oh-oh!"_

Something tender inwardly caressed the Torn Prince as the song continued on.

Ben looked down, puzzled at the sight of his deceased lover adjusting his arm around his waist, over the back of his worn letterman jacket. "Kid, what are you—?"

Royce put his right arm on Ben's neck, grasped his wrist, rose it to shoulder's length, and then intertwined his cool fingers with Ben's warm ones. It became clear to Ben what Royce wanted as soon as the ghost had begun to gently sway against him.

"What the hell do you think this is, Clayton? Prom night?" he boisterously gibed, effortlessly tuning out the turbid wail that sounded from the Bound Woman's cell at his speaking of the phrase _prom night._

Royce merely smiled expectantly as he continued to sway against Ben, lost in his gray eyes.

"Kid, you kill me." He sighed in defeat, firmly locked his arm around Royce's waist, tightened the grasp of their conjoined hands, and began to sway in enamored motion with him.

" _Earth angel, Earth angel, please be mine._

 _My darling dear, love you all the time._

 _I'm just a fool, a fool in love with you._

 _Do! Do-do-do! Do-do-do!"_

 **Author's Note:** Thus, part one concludes. Do leave me a review? Like it? Hate it? Let your opinion be known.


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